Japan 1868-1945: Art, Architecture, and National Identity || Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity: Art by Contemporary Japanese and Japanese American Artists

Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity: Art by Contemporary Japanese andJapanese American ArtistsAuthor(s): Karin HigaSource: Art Journal, Vol. 55, No. 3, Japan 1868-1945: Art, Architecture, and NationalIdentity (Autumn, 1996), pp. 6-13Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777760 .

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Some Thoughts on

National and Cultural Identity Art by Contemporary Japanese and Japanese American Artists

Edited by Karin Higa

Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry have been linked in the American political realm and in

popular imagination since the beginning of Japanese migration to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Mostly, the conflation of a foreign Japanese identity with a Japanese American one has resulted in both tremendous racism and cultural misunderstanding. Anti-Japanese immigration and naturalization laws and the World War II incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans are evi- dence of the former impulse; the continued expectation and

interpretation of an essential "Japanese-ness" in the art and

expression of Japanese Americans exemplifies the latter. Contemporary artists of the last decade have chal-

lenged these cultural stereotypes by exploring, interrogat- ing, and critiquing notions of national and cultural identity. In the United States and Japan, artists have begun to examine the contours of their ethnicity, to engage in a nuanced interpretation of national and cultural identity, both as a primary project and as the by-product of other concerns. The fact that such investigations are taking place against the recent fiftieth anniversary of World War II's end provides an especially compelling backdrop to reconsiderations of Japanese and Japanese American

identity and expression. These Artists' Pages explore the tremendous range of such practices.

World War II left Japan defeated and devastated. The

aggressive military actions and the attempt to establish, through force, the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosper- ity Sphere were brought to a decisive halt. In an unprece- dented radio broadcast, Emperor Hirohito, the divine ruler, announced surrender, and the United States began its postwar occupation that would continue into the next decade.

Yukinori Yanagi mines this period in U.S.-Japanese history to investigate the residue of Japanese nationalism in the postwar period, despite the explicit goals of the

Occupation to demilitarize and democratize Japan. In a recent exhibition at the Peter Blum gallery in New York, Yanagi paired The Chrysanthemum Carpet (1994) with an untitled photographic work of 1995. In the center of the deep red carpet is the outline of the imperial crest of Japan, the chrysanthemum. The central image is covered with a single brass petal. Scattered around are more brass chrysanthemum petals, and the phrase "he loves me, he loves me not" is embroidered in different Asian languages. Excerpts of the Japanese constitution, which was drafted under the jurisdiction of General Douglas MacArthur, are

reproduced on the carpet's underside, impossible to see

except by turning the carpet over. On the far wall is a photograph of MacArthur-whose official title, incidentally, was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces-with Emperor Hirohito. A quotation from the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima on the emperor's renunciation of his divin-

ity appears between the two figures. Here Yanagi deftly explores the wartime legacy of Japanese nationalism and its lingering effects, carefully constructing a critique that

implicates the American occupiers as well. During the war, on the other side of the Pacific,

Americans of Japanese ancestry were branded enemy aliens, subjected to acrimonious treatment and, ultimately, unjustly incarcerated. Lynne Yamamoto uses the personal history of her "picture bride" grandmother as the starting point for creating objects and installations that explore issues of labor, domesticity, sexuality, identity, and death in the life of a Japanese American immigrant woman. It was only recently that Yamamoto discovered that her

grandmother, who worked as a laundress on a sugar planta- tion in the territory of Hawai'i, committed suicide ten months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by drowning her- self in an ofuro, a Japanese bathtub. Submissions for Chiyo (1995) consists of 1,500 muslin squares arranged in a grid,

FALL 1996

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each obsessively embroidered with nine stitches of the artist's hair. The structured purity of the grid is disrupted both by the hair, which is at once intensely personal, pri- vate, and sexual, and by dates embossed on the wall that mark statistical events of the grandmother's existence: birth, migration, marriage, death. Yamamoto successfully conjures the presence of her grandmother while evoking the repetitive actions of domestic labor and the physicality of the body.

While Yamamoto's work derives from the experi- ences of a poor immigrant woman in the first half of this century, Mariko Mori's recent photographs investigate the transformation of tradition, gender roles, and fashion in the technologically savvy and media-driven culture of contem-

porary Japan. Chanoyu, the Japanese tea ceremony, which has its origins in fifteenth-century Japan, is now largely regarded as a feminine pursuit that stresses constraint, dis-

cipline, and tradition. However, the practitioner of Mori's Tea Ceremony III (1995) is a cyber "office lady" inspired by high-tech fashion and japanimation, the fast-paced, techno form of contemporary cartoon animation. Instead of partaking of tea within the traditional tatami room with tokonoma and Japanese art, the "participants" of Mori's tea ceremony casually stroll by. The Tokyo School of Fashion and other edifices representative of late twentieth-century capital loom large in the background. Mori has stated that her work "metaphorically questions women's position in

Japan and elsewhere."' In Tea Ceremony III, the explicit connection to a specifically Japanese context is essential to the work's provocative meaning.

For Takashi Murakami, popular culture, cartoons, and japanimation provide a way of locating a contemporary Japanese identity that is expressed through commodity culture. Using as his model the cute, cartoon-inspired toys and comics ubiquitous in contemporary Japan, Murakami fashions his own creations. As dolls, balloons, and graphic representations, Murakami's creations mimic the "real" thing. However, slight exaggerations and modifications push the cartoons over the edge. Appealing though they may be in form, they are also remarkably grotesque, bor- dering on the vulgar. It is interesting to note that Murakami is trained in nihonga, a Meiji-era painting style that emerged in the late nineteenth century in reaction to Japan's rapid aesthetic embrace of oil painting. Nihonga incorporates aspects of Western practices, such as model- ing and shading, with traditional Japanese material and subject matter to create a popular, though high art form of artistic expression. Such a practice is useful in considering Murakami's contemporary manifestations of hybridity and commodity culture.

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto take on media imagery and popular cultural expression, though different in origin from that explored by Murakami. For the past twenty years, the Yonemotos have interrogated the filmic language of

Hollywood and television and its constitutive affects on identity formation. The installation Environmental (1993) consists of a large screen made up of multiple home movie screens. Footage used in films about the war in the Pacific from the special effects department of Warner Brothers Studio is projected onto the fragmented surface. Across the room, a video monitor plays excerpts of early television commercials. The moving images represent the visual her- itage of the Yonemotos' childhood in postwar America. As Japanese Americans, they participated in, but were also the targets of, the media's propagandistic and sometimes openly racist attitudes.

For most of the artists examined here, looking Japan- ese remains a key starting point for the work. The Japanese presence is manifested visually by some form of representation. Gavin Flint, however, uses language and communi- cation as the marker of difference. Born on Guam and raised in Japan by American and Eurasian parents, Flint does not appear to be "Japanese." In a recent performance, he used the disparity between external appearance and audience expectation to underscore the way communica- tion is either confirmed or denied by visual representation. The performance consisted of Flint giving a lecture in Japanese to an audience who knew him to speak English only. Flint knew in advance that one person in the audience could understand Japanese. Unwilling to translate into English himself, Flint not only confounded the audience, but forced one person to become the interpreter for the others. _

Note 1. Cited in Kathleen F. Magnan, "The Cyber Chic of Mariko Mori," Art Asia

Pacific 3, no. 1 (1996): 66.

KARIN HIGA is curatorfor art at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and is in the graduate art

history program at UCLA.

GAVIN FLINT is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles who creates performances, installations, and photographs.

TAKASHI MURAKAMI is an artist who lives in both Tokyo and New York City. Cuteness and youth culture are the

primary materials for his manipulation.

MARIKO MORI was born in Tokyo and went to New York in 1992 after studying in London. She now divides her time between New York and Tokyo.

LYNNE YAMAMOTO is a New York-based visual artist

originally from Honolulu, Hawai i.

YUKINORI YANAGI was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He divides his time between studios in Saitama, Japan, and New York City.

BRUCE AND NORMAN YONEMOTO are Los Angeles-based artists who create single-channel video and video installations.

ART JOURNAL

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Yukinori Yanagi, The Chrysanthemum Carpet, 1994, wool carpet and brass, 252 x 4721/2 inches, and Untitled, 1995, photograph and silkscreen on canvas, 76 x 58 inches. Courtesy Peter Blum, New York.



Lynne Yamamoto, Submissions for Chiyo (detail), installation, 1995, hair, muslin, pins, photograph, and embossed dates, 60 x 120 x 1 inches. Collection of the artist.

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Mariko Mori, Tea Ceremony III, 1995, laminated crystal print, 48 x 60 x 2 inches. Courtesy American Fine Arts, New York.



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Japan 1868-1945: Art, Architecture, and National Identity || Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity: Art by Contemporary Japanese and Japanese American Artists